John Pinches running again for 3rd District Mendocino County Board of Supervisors

What a difference a year makes. Last February, when Gov. Jerry Brown’s office sought candidates to fill the 3rd District seat on the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors vacated when Tom Woodhouse resigned due to health issues, former supervisor John Pinches said he had no plans to run for the permanent seat in 2018.

He was nevertheless endorsed by the board to replace Woodhouse from among a pool of six candidates to fill the departed supervisor’s term.

A year later, Pinches is seeking a fourth term on the board because he said he does not like the direction the county has been heading.

“These aren’t the Russians doing it to us, we are doing it to ourselves,” he said.

Cannabis

Among some of the issues facing the county which Pinches said he wants to address is the complex process of cannabis permitting, which the candidate said is easier to address than most people think.

“I told the county I could write cannabis regulation rules on the back of a bar napkin,” he said, outlining his plan for simplifying the county’s cannabis program.

“Basically what I would do is I would allow people to grow 25 plants on their parcel and pay a minimal fee of $20 a plant. That would be $500 for your garden. Half of it goes to the Sheriff’s Office and half goes to the county’s general fund and that would be all money coming in, with no cost of issuing (permits). If there was a problem with that, if somebody complained they could call the MCSO.”

Pinches said gardens above 2,000 square feet necessitate dealing with other state agencies like the California Fish and Wildlife department and are subject to a major use permit.

“Use permits are conditional,” he said. “They have public hearings on major use permits. I am not saying you can’t get bigger than 25 plants, but they are going to have to go through the major use permit process and address safety issues, security issues, smell issues and where you get new water from all that.”

He said there is a countywide grading ordinance already on the books where people have to get a grading permit for more than 1,000 yards of dirt.

“Basically I am just bringing cannabis into the realm of the way to do business,” he said. “If you want to put in a small sawmill on a conforming piece of property like non-industrial you can do it, but you have to go through the use permit process, and then the public is able to comment and hopefully you can condition those problems we have. It’s as simple as that; “keep it simple, stupid,” like the old saying goes.”

In answer to the issue of overlay zoning, whereby separate zones are proposed where people can grow and others can’t, Pinches said he is totally opposed to the idea and to the hiring of a consultant to help create the zones.

“There is a process; you can’t create a separate zone and call it an overlay zone where some people can grow and some can’t,” Pinches said.

“First of all, you have to go through the Local Agency Formation Commission to form districts and that’s exactly what they are talking about. Whether you form a water district or a fire district there’s a process to go through and that takes years.”

According to Pinches, the process of cannabis permitting in Mendocino County has become too convoluted.

“Just keep it simple,” he said. “As far as the economy, the amount of volume that they are getting from 25 plants is like a couple of hundred pounds. That’s plenty. I am not saying you can’t get bigger but then you have to get to another level of process. In either case, we still have to live under the rule that cannabis is still federally illegal.”

Housing

Pinches said he has some ideas of how to help the housing stock in the county, including building new mobile home parks in various locations throughout the county and reviewing and doing away with what he calls “no-growth policies” currently adopted, which he said have helped stymie the number of housing units small and large throughout the county.

“We haven’t built a new mobile home park in Mendocino County in over 60 years,” he said. “When I was on the board last time I pushed and got approval for a land owner that wanted to put a mobile home park north of Laytonville. The owners aren’t doing it now because they got a divorce, but I got an idea of putting another large mobile home park at another location.”

One of the biggest tasks facing the county, according to Pinches, is the need to address land use policies when it comes to second and third units on smaller pieces of properties.

“If you have a small piece of property and you’ve got a home on it and you are on a leach field – which most of this county is not on sewer systems, they are on leach fields – environmental health as a policy makes you designate an area on the property in case your leach field fails you can put a new leach field.

“That’s bogus,” Pinches said, adding that the buyability of small parcels with second and third units on them can be increased by eliminating the requirement to designate a separate area on the property for an alternative septic tank leach field.

He pointed out mobile home park and mobile homes are very adaptive to the economic needs because you can buy a $40,000 mobile home or you can buy a $240,000 home, depending on your income level. “I think I can improve the county’s housing stock in the hundreds of units,” he said.

Economic development

As a strong supporter of the Willits bypass in the past, Pinches is unapologetic about his participation in making the project a reality, saying people who attribute the permanent shuttering of local business to the bypass fail to consider some of them were struggling financially prior to the bypass opening nearly a year-and-a-half ago.

“Take the Willits pharmacy building. Safeway bought that pharmacy and moved it out to the Safeway store. The employees are still there, but it looked kind of bad because in the middle of Willits there was this big building vacant.”

He said in the case of JD Redhouse, competition from Mendo Mill and other stores had more to do with a drop in sales than the construction of the bypass.

Infrastructure

The 3rd District candidate named infrastructure as one of his top priorities.

“The first thing you gotta do is travel the road; I don’t want to just maintain the roads,” he said. “I want to get them improved.”

Another project Pinches would like to tackle is adding more vocational programs at Mendocino College and other county institutions for various industries and occupations.

“Over 50 percent of the students that graduate from our local high schools don’t go on to college. They are going to try and make a living right here so if we can do some vocational programs, whether it be welding, mechanic, truck driving, we need to work on that.”

Mental health

According to Pinches, there are currently two funding sources in place for mental health: an increment of residents’ sales tax, which brings in more than $25 million a year to the county, and the more recent Mental Health Services Act which is a relatively new tax measure which brings in a lot of money for mental health services.

“We have a lot of outreach services, from Gualala to Leggett Valley to Fort Bragg to the mountains. Now with this new tax measure, (Measure B) it’s going to build us a new mental health facility, probably the Willits area is a more central location. The elephant in the room is nobody wants something in their backyard, so it’s not without opposition.

“The old hospital in Willits is probably the most likely and the cheapest and the best location,” Pinches said, adding that he has been told it will cost $4- to $8 million to refurbish the location. He said his concern is that having a central location should not eliminate services going out to rural areas.